ARH 411 Theory & Methods ~ R Zink

  Blog Post Topic: " Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema " by Laura Mulvey This week we explored the mid-70's writing (shortened version) of Laura Mulvey to follow how women have been a large part of the cinema, but not as characters, exactly. Her main goal was to address the way the female form has been left out of many other analyses. Following this writing wasn't as challenging as I expected, but there were a few new concepts I had to look up like scopophilia (pleasure in looking) and Jacques Lacan's psychoanalysis work, and a few refreshers like Freud's models of phallocentric psychoanalysis. Mulvey started by identifying the imbalance in representation and how women are seen as lacking compared to men. Patriarchal values can be seen in the way women are seen as objects in a man's world. Mulvey goes on to describe how the narcissistic viewing pleasure associated with Lacan's "mirror phase" in childhood has shaped films. Self-awareness an...

  Blog Post topic: " Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? " by Linda Nochlin The Studio of Jean-Antoine Houdon Louis-Léopold Boilly, 1808 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Louis-L%C3%A9opold_Boilly_-_Houdon_in_His_Studio.jpg Our latest reading was “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” written in 1971 by Linda Nochlin. This was quite an invigorating read as it challenges many institutional barriers I know well from the feminist movement. Seeing as this was written the year my mother was born and is now over 50 years old, it is (somewhat) surprisingly still very relevant and current for today. Nochlin starts by challenging the question itself and studying who has been considered a “great” artist in the first place. She finds that there are always examples of women-made artwork that compare to any of the recognized greats, but a the question is not worth answering in the first place because it doesn't address the apparent lack of access, resources, and t...

Blog Post topic: "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" by Walter Benjamin Written in 1935, this well-known work by a Jewish-German author goes over the concepts of aura and authenticity regarding mechanically reproducing artworks, but I found them exceedingly tedious. Originality and value are also mentioned throughout the essay, and I found myself strongly disagreeing with his interpretation of most of these concepts. Although I agree generally with his notion that Fascism weaponizes anything and everything (which includes mass reproduction) the issue to me is not found in the technique of copying art but rather the intent of the artist (and a Fascist is a poor representation of an artist). Fascists will continue to use all methods they can get their hands on, but to say that the problem is in the destruction of an object’s aura/authenticity rather than the destruction of the proletarian’s means of power is a mistake in my eyes. While reading this compositi...

Blog Post topic: "Every Man Knows Where and How Beauty Gives Him Pleasure: Beauty Discourse and the Logic of Aesthetics" by Amelia Jones Amelia Jones thoroughly went over many key points about artistic beauty in her writing, which was originally written as a talk. She uses many references to the writings of “great figures in the history of aesthetics” as she says, to dismantle the exclusionary framework they’ve built as their authority to judge artistic aesthetics. Dave Hickey's “The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty” gets a special emphasis from Jones as an outdated contemporary perspective. Although we all agreed in class that this was a difficult read as we read it, I’m only really frustrated that we don’t have more time as a class with this reading. I found myself looking up many things, too many things, as I tried to understand Jones as clearly as she was intending to be heard. Her writing is so full of content and intentional meaning that I was reading some pa...